Solution Techniques

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Introduction

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 Logistics Processes
Transport
• External: procurement, distribution
• Internal: between production sites, storage locations
• Mode of transport (rail, vessel, barge, truck)
Handling
• Loading and unloading, sorting, stocking and releasing
• Combining transport modes
• Interface between internal and external transport
Consignment
• assemble items into orders
Storage
Packaging

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Designing Transport Networks

Determine number, location, function of the networks nodes.

Facility location problem
p-median problem

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 Designing Transport Networks
Facility location problem
-Single-commodity single-echelon continuous location problems:
Ex:Weiszfeld heuristic
-Single-commodity single-echelon discrete location problems:
Ex: capacitated plant location (CPL) problem.
simple plant location (SPL) model
p-median model
*As a rule, capacitated problems are harder than uncapacitated ones.
A Lagrangian heuristic for the capacitated plant location problem

To evaluate whether a heuristic solution is a tight upper bound (UB) on the

optimal solution value, it is useful to determine a lower bound (LB) on the
optimal solution value. This yields a ratio (UB − LB)/ LB which represents an
overestimate of the relative deviation of the heuristic solution value from the
optimum.

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Planning Transport Paths and
Modes
Transportation problem

Minimum cost flow problem

Multicommodity flow problems

[ς,c] f 3 [3,4]
v1 v2
3 [5,2] [3,2] 3

[2,6]

s [1,1] t
b(s)= 5 b(t)=
2 [3,4] −5
[7,3] 2
v3

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 Vehicle Use and Tour Planing

Travelling salesman problem

Vehicle routing problem

Pick-up-and-delivery problem

Dial-a-ride problem:

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 Vehicle Use and Tour Planing
Pickup and delivery problems constitute an important class of vehicle routing
problems in which objects or people have to be collected and distributed.

Berbeglia, G., Cordeau, J. F., Gribkovskaia, I., & Laporte, G. (2007). Static pickup and
delivery problems: a classification scheme and survey. Top, 15(1), 1-31.

The Dial-a-Ride Problem (DARP) consists of designing vehicle routes and schedules for n users
who specify pickup and delivery requests between origins and destinations. Very often the
same user will have two requests during the same day: an outbound request from home to a
destination (e.g., a hospital), and an inbound request for the return trip. In the standard version,
transport is supplied by a fleet of m identical vehicles based at the same depot. The aim is to
plan a set of minimum cost vehicle routes capable of accommodating as many requests as
possible, under a set of constraints. The most common example arises in door-to-door
transportation services for elderly or disabled people. From a modeling point of view, the DARP
generalizes a number of vehicle routing problems such as the Pickup and Delivery Vehicle
Routing Problem (PDVRP) and the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW).
What makes the DARP different from most such routing problems is the human perspective.
The dial-a-ride problem: models and algorithms.

Cordeau, J. F., & Laporte, G. (2007). The dial-a-ride problem: models and algorithms. Annals of
Operations Research, 153(1), 29-46. 8 / 319
Heuristics

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 Heuristics
1 Local Search and
Metaheuristics Local Search
Variable Neighborhood Search
Evolutionary Algorithms
2 Capacitated Vehicle
Routing Construction
heuristics Two-Phase
Heuristics Improvement
Heuristics Evolutionary
Algorithm
3 Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows
(VRPTW) Construction Heuristics
Improvement Heuristics
Metaheuristics
4 Pickup and Delivery Problems
(PDP) Tabu Search 10 / 319
 Why Do We Need Heuristics

It is often very hard to solve practical optimization problems.

Exact optimization methods can require a huge amount of time
and memory.
It might be even very hard to find a feasible solution.

Heuristics are often able to determine good solutions for difficult

problems.
What are the drawbacks?
• No optimiality guarantee.
• No performance guarantee.

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 Heuristics

One usually discerns between:

Construction heuristics: usually

problem specific, fast
and simple

Improvement heuristics:
on top of construction heuristics (require some solution),
try stepwise improvement of solution with small changes,
possibly based on problem independent principles

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 Metaheuristics
Improvement heuristics usually result in local optima.
Hard problems often have several local optima that are not
globally optimal.

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 Metaheuristics

Metahaeuristics are methods able to escape local

optima.

Some Metaheuristics:
• Simulated Annealing
• Variable Neighbourhood Search
• Very Large Neighbourhood Search
• Tabu Search
• Ant Colony Optimization
• Genetic Algorithms

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 Simple Local Search
Local Search
begin
x ← initial solution;
repeat:
choose an x r ∈ N(x );
if f (x r) ≤ f (x ) then
x ← x r;
until termination criterion met;
end

N(x ): Neighborhood of x

(Assuming a minimization problem.)

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 Components of Local Search

Definition of solution representation

Definition of objective function f (x )

Initial solution

Neighborhood structure, i.e. what are neighboring solutions?

Step function, i.e. in what order is the neighborhood searched?

Termination criterion

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